Bitcoin And The Commodity of Time
I had a long drive ahead of me. Nine hours down the coast, with a few stretches of time I knew I’d be out of streaming service range, and perhaps even out of AM/FM. Knowing this, I took a moment and dropped by my local Goodwill to take a gander at their CD collection before making my way. Lo and behold, I found a 3-CD boxed set of a Grateful Dead show from the 70s I had loved as a teenager, and figured that was the best bang for my couple of bucks: nearly three hours of guitars, feedback, percussive clomping and pitchy-sometimes-but-earnest-at-all-times singing. I bet the overlap of Bitcoiners and Dead Heads is slim, and I am not nearly as evangelical about the Dead’s underlying fundamentals, but alas, as I drove further into the cosmic slop, a parallel between the two movements formed. As the hours flew by, I couldn’t help but think how Bitcoin not only will bring about a global and free energy market, but with it, the re-commodification of time.
There’s a lot of talk about time in the Bitcoin space, and for good reason. A fundamental mechanic of the solution to the Byzantine Generals’ problem is the immutability of the timestamp that orders all Bitcoin transactions. Without this component, the capped supply issuance that ensures digital scarcity would be meaningless; it doesn’t matter how little bitcoin exists if one can just double-spend the same UTXO at a whim.
Proof-of-work creates immutable, decentralized truth by necessitating not just energy, but also the time spent searching for nonces for output hashes with enough leading zeroes to bring the next block header below the current difficulty target. Bitcoin does a brilliant job of utilizing the standardized local clock of a processor on the network to find an average of time spent (600 seconds target per block) across the whole network without relying on a centralized clock source to validate transaction orders. People like to scoff at Bitcoin transactions being inefficient, or slow, without realizing the implications of a global, digitally scarce, permission-less bearer asset with immutable, final settlement in under 30 minutes. The blockchain is simply a database of transactional signatures crystalized in impunity via a continuous hash string of blockheaders hashed with candidate block transactions in order to find the next blockheader. By stacking the previous blocks output hash on top of a universal forgetful function to find the next nonce, the serpentine chain of ledger becomes ever immutable; as every block stacks alongside the upward difficulty adjustment continuing its decade ascent, it becomes harder, and importantly, more wasteful for a bad faith actor to try and reorganize spends.
The act of spending electrical energy is not enough to find value in the digital space, it must be applied directly to spending time effectively, accurately computing within the consensus and thus securing the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Grateful Dead weren’t always known by that name, and in fact, they got their first public audiences performing under the name “The Warlocks.” Unbeknownst to each other at the time, they shared that name with a young, upstart art band out of New York City. When the slow and lossy communications reached their respective coast via the new, blossoming independent music scene, they both decided to change their name. The Dead went on to see fairly imminent success throughout the following decades, whilst their counterparts changed their name to The Velvet Underground and enjoyed somewhat critical but overall muted popularity until a resurgence of their canon in the late 70s. Neither one of them wanted to spend the time to make a claim to their brand, and thus both moved on without so much any litigation or litigators. The Dead did a lot of things that are unheard of today in the hyper-commodification era of art, but perhaps none more important than allowing technologicly-savvy fans to bring their own recording equipment into their venues and tape the improvisation-heavy performances for their own, non-commercial use. A devoted taping community grew out of this allowance, and an entirely new way for hungry fans to engage with the product gave rise to a peer-to-peer market of tapes of shows highlighted for a spattering of personal reasons; someone’s one-hundredth show, a birthday, New Year’s Eve, debut of new material, a particularly good version of a beloved song, etc. Over time, this strictly-non-commercially-incentivized community drove each other to higher heights of recording quality, with new masters, new techniques, better microphones and better gear led to a powerful, decentralized taper community ready to offer their celluloid of choice for yours in a free market of experiences.
The particular boxed set I bought is from a series called Dick’s Picks, named after the long time soundboard engineer of the band who utilized the data harvested from decades of trade and discussion amongst diehards to find the overwhelming favored shows of interest and, pulling from the archives of recordings directly from the band’s own board, released commercial products of high quality directly targeted at the fans who made those shows famous in the first place by taping and trading their experience. I was a couple hours into my drive, stopping to feel the pain of filling my car with gas, when I decided to humor myself and see what these things sell for; it seemed kind of strange, knowing that nearly every show the band has ever played at this point has been recorded, located, and tagged online, legally, and for free, that these box sets could ever retain their value, furthermore proved by the fact I had found one for only a few dollars.
Imagine my initial confusion when I found that not only did they retain their value, the three discs were listed on eBay anywhere from $65-$150, appreciating at least three times in value since the February 1996 release. So not only did they compete with the slightly lower quality but freely distributed tapes, but by printing a limited run, they created supply less than ultimate demand. Had the person that donated this set to Goodwill taken the time to see its value on the open market, they might have made a different decision. Had an employee of Goodwill taken the time to search reseller markets, they might have priced the set with a higher premium.
The point isn’t about whether these discs kept pace with gold from 1996 to 2021, but how they leveraged an open market of experiences to be commodified without innate commercial intent. The band put their advertising and commercial outreach into the hands of those that understood the product the best, resulting in deeper bond between the perceived value of the experience through the network of audience and the value of a high-fidelity commodity for re-experience. Certain nights, the group consciousness of a tuned-in-but-definitely-dropped-out masses, on the stage and off, came together in just the right way; those were the nights you wanted to play in your van on your four-and-a-half hour drive to the next night’s show.
A whole community of trading tapes grew alongside the formidable touring empire of the band’s now ubiquitous pop-culture presence. They always sold plenty of tickets, plenty of albums, plenty of t-shirts, and whatever loss of property they seemingly endured by allowing their fans this freedom was more than made up in other revenue streams. But beyond the obvious free marketing, production, and distribution, the band got something far more meaningful; they got a large following of humans to experience their lives listening to the recordings of the group. I don’t care to convince you on their merits, that is not the point here, but I think anyone should agree there is simply something different about the way fans of this group behave in a lifestyle manner. This open network,…
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